All the Space She No Longer Filled
by Leondra
Summary: Denial is a terrible thing. Monica has some doubts about exacting proper revenge on Chandler for calling her fat. Takes place in Thanksgiving 1988. Onesided MC


**AN: Well, This is an odd piece. Some Monica-has-a-crush-on-Chandler, but no actual Mondler romance. Takes place in Thanksgiving 1988 (where Monica cuts off Chandler's toe.) You have to be familiar with TOW All the Thanksgivings to get this. The first section takes place before she cuts off his toe (pretend there's a big time lapse after Rachel tells Monica to seduce him to get revenge and before Chandler comes in to request more macaroni and cheese). The second section (after ) takes place after Monica gets back from the hospital. **

It's been a whole year, and her stomach is flat, and her legs look (comparatively) long, as well as newly shaved (she hopes no one will mention the places where she nicked herself- she'd never before been confident enough to wear a skirt.)

Monica leaned against the doorframe, attempting to raise one eyebrow in a sultry way, but painfully aware that the only thing the act accomplished was giving her a bad squint.

She grimaced as her newly sharp shoulder blades pressed against the hard wood; giving her a whole new feeling of discomfort. She solved the problem by imagining them as two knifes- a threat to push back all the insecurity; she has no use for her now.

Whether she has use for it or not, some easily slips through the now large gaps between her body and the doorway, sniggering at her reflection and conjuring up double chins and the beginnings of a pimple on her nose.

She didn't feel nearly as confident as Rachel insisted she should. _Maybe_ it had something to do with the smirky boy with the blue eyes and the hair that added at least three inches to his already impressive height. Rachel thankfully hadn't made the connection between the fact that Smirky was in the next room right now, engaging in casual conversation with her parents and Monica's insistence that every dress she wore looked hideous on her.

It doesn't feel like she earned it.

Not that she didn't earn being thin. All the new space she didn't fill carried memories of 5 am runs, missed dinners, garden salads (no dressing), nothing with skin or fat or _meat_….

She had earned it.

But it seemed as if it hadn't earned _her_.

Her heart wasn't in danger; she could win at things _other_ than table hockey and arcade games; and she looked good; felt good (mostly). But every girl had this, didn't they? Many of them working not a _fraction _as hard as she had (still did). They took their small stomachs and small dress sizes for granted in their small minds and big allowances.

They had everything.

They had guys like Chip Matthews. They had guys like Chandler Bing.

And she could have him, too! (Not that she _wanted_ him.)

So she would take Rachel's advice- have him without really having him; want him without really wanting him.

And then people would point and laugh at _him_.

…But what if he _didn't_ want her? Monica had never thought about the prospect that she might turn out ugly when she lost all the weight, but now that she thought about it, her hair was limp, her face angular, her shoulders sagging….

Rachel insisted she looked gorgeous, but Rachel had also insisted that size didn't matter, back in the days where it couldn't or _Monica _wouldn't matter. So Rachel would tell her that she did, and it didn't, but her eyes would sometimes say 'switch the two' and so would her mouth (although not in so many words), when she and Chip were going through a "rough patch", and Rachel would make sweeping generalizations and self-criticisms, bemoaning that Chip had cheated on her because in some angles of light, her face looked chubby.

The key part of Rachel's plan was that Chandler had to get naked (he also had to get out of the laugh, and someone had to point and laugh, but naked boosted the humiliation level of the other two). What would his body look like? It didn't seem like he worked out much (he was, after all, _Ross_' best friend), but he did seem lean and the kind of person she really wouldn't mind seeing shirtless on the cover of a magazine.

…not something she should be focusing on.

But really, it was better to get this strange yearning and awe for him out of her system now, before he came back into the kitchen and being in control of the situation was a necessity.

So _would_ it be one of his good physical traits? Like his eyes or his smile or his long, thin fingers or his large, graceful hands, or…the odds were against him, really. He seemed too perfect in a elegantly casual way, and the hair was fixable.

'_I don't want to be stuck here with your fat sister._'

Well, perfect in a physical way.

And that's another reason. Another reason to find a few physical flaws. To point and laugh and maybe take a few Polaroid pictures.

That in mind, Monica straightened, running the rowel through her fingers like Rachel had instructed. It didn't look as though men would be turned on by it, but Rachel knew a hell of a lot more about men then Monica did.

Well, that had been _totally_ useless. And painful, and humiliating. And not even for him! (Well, maybe the painful, and a little of the humiliating, but not in the intended way.) And now, sitting at the kitchen table and trying to ignore the fact that there was a toe somewhere in this kitchen, all Monica could think about was that she hadn't gotten to actually see him naked, and feel a vague disappointment at the fact that this had been her only opportunity to do so.

Not that it was an opportunity she should take. Except for purely vengeful purposes.

But, just in case anyone who might assume she had actually _given_ her flower to him, _how would it feel_? Since she had only ever been kissed once, her frame of reference for touching someone intimately was brushing her fingertips against the smooth strokes of his collarbone (she found something strangely fascinating about his collarbone, however weird it sounded; it was like a painting, especially complimented by the graceful arch of his neck), or running her hands through his hair (Chandler really was being distinctly unhelpful with the whole "stop _liking_ him" plan. His hairstyle had improved greatly since the last time she saw him).

But, even in keeping with that frame of reference, Monica had never actually _touched_ Chandler, not even a handshake or an accidental brush-up against him as she walked past (not that she hadn't tried the second one- many times, in fact). And really, the closest she would ever come would be if her mother forced her to search for the toe and dispose of it. But that was beyond disgusting, so Monica wasn't going to think about that.

So, since she didn't have a single touch memory to associate with him, she was going to have to rely on her other senses to conjure up a purely hypothetical comparison. Would it feel like him calling her macaroni and cheese "righteous" and "slamming"? (He'd only actually used the first word in describing her mac and cheese, but she interspersed them in her head, to try and fool herself into thinking she wasn't so pathetic after all. That she hadn't memorized and analyzed and re-analyzed every single word he'd uttered in her presence.)

But really, her excuses just got thinner and thinner, and, as she'd explained to a frantic Rachel who'd grabbed a frantic Monica as she'd put the (what she thought was) a toe on ice, she'd just followed Rachel's instructions on how to seduce Chandler without allowing her brain to catch up with her body. This, in hind-sight, was probably not the smartest thing to do, especially when handling sharp objects.

So now his left wicker shoe will never be the same, and _none_ of his left shoes will ever fill out the same way again, and it's all her fault.

But at least no one was pointing and laughing.

(Monica's opinion of that was changed after Ross came home for Christmas break and regaled them with tales of Sir Limps-A-Lot.)

**AN: I kind of hate this piece. Strangely enough, I love other people's work because the writing style is different, and hate mine if the writing style is different. I just noticed that the story keeps changing tenses, but oh, well. We can excuse it as me being creative. So…either: **

**That was hideous. Let me hit the back button**

**Or **

**That was hideous. Let me flame the author. **

**Whee! Decisions, decisions! **


End file.
